The mummies of the Tarim Basin

The mummies of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, China provide startling clues about the ancient history of mankind.

The Tarim Basin, north of Tibet and east of the Himalayas, is an extremely arid desert, with a very high salinity in the sandy soil. Thousands of extraordinarily well-preserved mummies have been found in the area of the Taklamakan Desert, some of them between 3,000 and 3,800 years old (1800 BC to 1000 BC). The bodies were not actually mummified, but rather placed in deep graves and not covered with earth, with a layer between the body and the ground so that no moisture could reach the body, and the extreme dryness desiccated them completely.

The garments of these people are incredibly well-preserved, and display a high degree of skill, rich colors, and even tartan patterns typical of the later Celtic people of the British Isles. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has written a fascinating and extremely detailed study of the textiles and clothing designs of these ancient people, called The Mummies of Urumchi.

Most amazing, however, is the fact that the people themselves are clearly European in appearance (or what we would today consider European, although it is quite possible that today's Europeans are descended from a people who once lived in Egypt, the Levant, and modern Iran), with distinctive facial features, often reddish beards and hair, sometimes long blonde braids, and very tall of stature (the well-preserved Yingpan Man, who wears a gold-foiled death mask, is 6' 6" tall). Many of the women have extremely fine features of great beauty, such as the mummy pictured above who is known as the Beauty of Xiaohe. The mummies' non-Asiatic characteristics have now been confirmed by the modern science of DNA testing, which (as the video above explains) was not as advanced even thirty years ago in the late 1980s when the Tarim Basin mummies first began to be studied in earnest, and which reveals their western ancestry.

One of the key figures in studying the importance of these mummies, Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, gave in 2010 a fascinating lecture which is available on YouTube here which is worth watching in its entirety (it is unfortunately cut short at the end). In it he describes his first encounter with the mummies in a curtained-off section of a museum in Urumqi, during which he was mesmerized when he came face-to-face with the mummy often called the Cherchen Man, who he was surprised to discover looked just like his brother Dave, sleeping peacefully!

The Cherchen Man, pictured below (and linked to the entire video from Professor Mair), has an ochre spiral painted upon the side of his face, which we can conclude was painted on after death because the paint pot and application spoon were still in the tomb beside him. However, Martin Doutré has pointed out the similarities of this distinctive pattern to the Maori moko tattoos which often featured such facial spirals (see figures 7 through 11 in this article by Mr. Doutré).
















The possibility of such a connection may seem remote, except for the fact that it is by no means the only clue that Celtic or pre-Celtic people (or their descendents, who were still using such spirals in their art) may have crossed the oceans and settled in places as far from Europe as modern-day Peru and even the South Pacific and New Zealand. For other evidence please see this post and this post.

There are several important lessons we can draw from the mummies of the Tarim Basin (actually, there are no doubt hundreds of important lessons, but only a few will be touched on here).

First, we can say that "mummies don't lie." It is possible to dismiss as forgeries the many inscriptions that don't fit the conventional assumptions regarding the timeline of the ancient past (even though at some point the volume of such dismissals makes one wonder how forgers were so busy creating hoaxes over the centuries and whether perhaps the forgery explanation is not the best answer). However, a mummy cannot really be forged, especially a mummy that will pass a DNA test. The remains of anomalous people-groups found in Peru and New Zealand are similarly difficult to dismiss and should be considered carefully.

Second, ancient mankind traveled a lot further than they have previously been given credit for. This proclivity may go a long way towards explaining the incredible coincidences found in mythologies around the world (including in China), such as the presence of distinctive precessional numbers that are difficult to explain by any other method except by ancient contact. When we see how far these Tarim Basin people were from western Europe, it becomes less plausible to ascribe common mythological patterns to some sort of Jungian "collective unconscious" and much more plausible to ascribe these commonalities to ancient contact.

The Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin is some of the most remote and inhospitable terrain on earth. It would be difficult to find another spot further from an ocean and more difficult to settle. While the presence of mummies from 3,800 years ago in the Tarim Basin does not of course prove that ancient mankind could also cross the seas, other evidence suggests that they could and they did. Also, the Tarim Basin people apparently remained there for many centuries and many long generations. In the YouTube video above, Professor Mair explains that in very remote regions, occasional examples of blond hair still exist in the genetic makeup of the people in the region. He also points out a fascinating linguistic connection between the Swedish word mjod (for "mead") and the pronunciation for the word for "honey" in Old Chinese, and the fact that the ancient Tarchanian language spoken by these people is linguistically connected to the languages of northwestern Europe.

Finally, the very salinity of the desert region that allowed for the incredible preservation of these mummies is consistent with the arguments of Walt Brown's hydroplate theory. As noted in this previous post, Dr. Brown argues that:

Drainage of the waters that covered the earth left every continental basin filled to the brim with water. Some of these postflood lakes lost more water by evaporation and seepage than they gained by rainfall and drainage from higher elevations. Consequently, they shrank over the centuries. A well-known example was former Lake Bonneville, part of which is now the Great Salt Lake. 107.

Because of the high ranges surrounding the Tarim Basin (the Tien Shan, the Kunlun and the Atlan ranges), very little precipiation made it over these mountains and into the Tarim Basin. Thus, any trapped water in that basin would lose more water by evaporation and end up -- like the enormous salt flats in Utah around the Great Salt Lake -- a barren and salty desert. There is some evidence (such as the wood poles and leaf piles still present around the burial complex) that there were still some rivers present in the area thousands of years ago, although the ground was obviously still very salty. All of this appears to be consistent with the hydroplate theory.

There is much more of course that could be said about the amazing mummies of the Tarim Basin in China. Readers are urged to check out the above videos, as well as the many other published books and articles on the web dealing with them. Most of all, we should consider them carefully for the unique clues they can offer to the mystery of mankind's ancient past.

Still believing isolationist theories?

In a previous post, we detailed some of the evidence of mythological parallels found in the legends of cultures as far removed as Scandinavia and the South Pacific. The example of the "world-tree" motif provides clear evidence of some ancient connection, and there are numerous other examples from mythology that are equally compelling or even more compelling.

However, some will argue that these apparent connections are not connected at all, but that numerous cultures simply landed on the same imagery for the same celestial phenomena in their own mythologies -- that they acted "in isolation" from one another. Perhaps, some have argued, there is even some common psychological theme or "collective unconscious" that causes isolated peoples to share similar myths even though separated by vast oceans or centuries of time.

Unfortunately for proponents of the isolationist theory, the mythological evidence is by no means the only evidence that supports the assertion that ancient peoples crossed the oceans quite regularly. There are the startling parallels between the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Pyramid of the Sun found at Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico, for example (the base perimeters of each are remarkably close, and the height of each is related to the base perimeter by a factor of pi: two pi times the height of the Great Pyramid equals the perimeter of its base, while four pi times the height of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan equals the perimeter of its base).

Even more stunning are the hundreds of mummies that have been unearthed in New World locations such as Peru. Many of these mummies have red, golden, or auburn hair. Some of it is wavy. All of these hair traits are very unlike the hair of the South American Indians of the area, which is black and very straight. Martin Doutré has documented this fact on his website in great detail.

As Mr. Doutré points out, red hair is a very rare trait among the peoples of the world, occurring in 1% or perhaps as many as 2% of all humans. Its incidence is highest in Europe, especially western and northern Europe. The fact that hundreds of mummies with light hair, many of them with red hair, exist in Peru is astonishing.

It might be possible to argue that these mummies were Europeans who came after AD 1492, except for the fact that they have numerous characteristics that make this explanation extremely unlikely. They are usually buried in a sitting posture (not characteristic of European burials in the modern or early modern periods), they are often arrayed in very colorful blankets and clothing that is completely unlike European clothing of the time, and they often wear their hair very long and sometimes in two long plaits or braids on either side of the head, which is not typical of Europeans after Columbus either.

It turns out that to continue to hold onto isolationist theories, one must look past an awful lot of evidence that argues differently, including evidence from mythology but also from archaeological sites such as the pyramids and even the extensive evidence from human remains.

Ruamahanga Woman

In July, 1999, in the final chapter of his book Ancient Celtic New Zealand, Martin

Doutré (after presenting extensive archaeological evidence to support his assertions), wrote:

The most likely era when the first / bulk of the Egyptian / Mediterranean or related british Megalithic people came to New Zealand would be around 3000 BC - 2500 BC. It is my belief that continuous migrations followed beyond that era.

[. . .]

Apart from the core population of pre-Celtic people, several other groups found their way to New Zealand as well. One such group was the "red haired" people who, according to Alaskan Indian (Haida) tradition, came by way of the Bering Strait, down the coast of North America and out into the Pacific. Ancient African, Egyptian, Libyan and Meso-American peoples seem to have set up residence in New Zealand also, from a very early epoch. There is evidence to support the tradition of a Tibetan group finding their way to the Northern Hokianga region and setting up a sizable population there.

[. . .]

With developed maritime activity and two-way trading between Hemispheres for thousands of years, European and Mediterranean peoples have direct lineages extending to ancient New Zealanders. Skeletal remains, reposing in caves or buried in New Zealand, must be the direct forebears of some present-day Europeans and, in a general sense, the extended family and offshoot branches of the greater European family tree.

[. . .]

By British colonial times [. . .] There were still non-amalgamated pockets of the more ancient pre-Celtic / Celtic people living in isolation, but their continued existence was always tenuous and predicament dangerous. It had been a harrowing, tiresome and anxious few centuries of daily grasping at life, leading up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. 280-284

Over five years after the above passages were published, in October 2004, a young local of New Zealand's rural Wairarapa Valley was walking along the banks of the Ruamahanga River with his two dogs. As an article by Vaughan Yarwood in  New Zealand Geographic number 96 (March - April 2009) describes it:

Stepping out onto a broad shoulder of river sand, studded with stone chip, he noticed what he took to be the upper surface of a whitish rock lit by the noonday sun. Getting closer he saw that it was bone. Such a thing was not uncommon hereabouts—he had often come across fragments, and even complete skulls, of cows and sheep. But as he scraped aside the stones and prised the object free, he realised with a shock that he held in his hands a human skull, discoloured with age, and bleached above and behind the right eye socket where it had lain exposed. There were several holes, one of them in the right temple, perhaps suggesting a violent death.

When the skull was turned over to the authorities, it was determined to be that of a European woman, aged 40 to 45 years. The shock came later, when the skull was submitted to radiocarbon dating, and determined to have belonged to someone who died around the year 1654, plus or minus 35 years (bracketing the year of death between 1619 - 1689, inclusive).

The difficulty this date poses for conventional history is the fact that no European woman was known to have been anywhere in or on New Zealand during that time period. Dutch explorer Abel Tasman (1603 - 1659) had sailed to New Zealand in 1642, but had not been able to land due to the violent reception his men received from the Maori warriors, who sailed out in war canoes (wakas) and killed four of his men when he first attempted to land. He also had no women on board.

No further European vessel is known to have made any contact whatsoever with New Zealand after Tasman's abortive 1642 visit for over 100 years, until the first voyage of James Cook, who sailed to New Zealand from Tahiti in 1769.

While conventional history has a major problem in explaining the skull of the Ruamahanga Woman (as she is sometimes called), the above alternative history proposed by Martin

Doutré and backed up by completely different archaeological evidence (since he proposed it before the skull of Ruamahanga Woman was even discovered) has no difficulty explaining the presence of a European woman in the remote mountains upstream of the Ruamahanga in the 1600s.

In fact, the skull is exactly the kind of evidence one would expect to discover if Mr. Doutré's theory is correct. He believes that the remnants of the previous inhabitants of New Zealand were forced into hiding in remote mountain locations some time after the arrival of the Maoris in around AD 1300 (perhaps after some centuries of peaceful coexistence).

He even describes "unsubstantiated testimony" of a massacre of "captured groups" containing women and children who "were herded together and then summarily executed by a blow to the right side of the head" (283). Again, Mr.

Doutré wrote those words in 1999, years before the discovery of a European female skull described as having a hole "in the right temple, perhaps suggesting a violent death."

As discussed in the Mathisen Corollary, the case of the Ruamahanga skull has been dismissed by conventional academics using a completely speculative story with no basis in evidence whatsoever.

In all fairness, even though it is a very powerful piece of evidence that something is amiss with the conventional narrative of mankind's ancient past, if it were the only piece of anomalous evidence, it might be appropriate to dismiss it. However, it is only one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of clues which together strongly support an alternative theory.

All mankind deserves to know about these things and to be allowed to draw conclusions for themselves. Unfortunately, few outside of New Zealand have probably even heard of the Ruamahanga Woman.